Card games have been played and enjoyed by millions with undiminished popularity for thousands of years. Today, most games enthusiasts consider the game of Contract Bridge to be the ultimate test of a card-player's skill. With an estimated 30 million players in America and similarly staggering figures in most Western countries, Bridge is almost certainly the most played game in the world today.
In Contract Bridge, the cards are shuffled and dealt to each of the players, whereupon the players then bid for the "contract" and play the hand accordingly. Scoring takes place as the points from individual played hands or deals make up game scores which, in turn, contribute toward the "rubber" score and the final tally. While the game requires a great deal of skill and imagination to win consistently, the "luck of the deal" can be a large factor. That is, when the better cards fall to one of the partnerships, that partnership will have an opportunity to score highly even though the partners may not be particularly skilled players.
The game of "Duplicate Bridge" was developed to eliminate the luck of the deal by causing the same deal to be played two or more times at different tables. This is the form of Bridge which is played in nearly all Bridge tournaments and provides a contest wherein the score is more a result of the player's skill than luck. In effect, all participating partners are made to play the same identical hands which their competitors play and the point gain, and thus the measure of skill, can then be made by comparing the scores of both the playing and defending partners with the results achieved by other foursomes. The Bridge hands after being bid and played by one foursome are kept in the same order, by not intermixing the cards, and are passed to the next foursome for bidding and play. This procedure is repeated until all the hands are played by each of the contestant foursomes. Scoring can then be made on the basis of what a foursome, both the playing and defending partners, did on a particular dealt hand relative to the results of all other competing foursomes.
The present invention facilitates the dealing of cards for the game of Duplicate Bridge in that cards may be dealt in a predetermined manner by use of individual code marks printed on the face side of the cards. The invention facilitates the play of Duplicate Bridge since the cards no longer need to be kept separate by player when passing the cards from table to table during tournament play. With this invention, the same hand can be dealt from any deck of coded cards as many times as required. Many different hands can be stored in a memory and called for dealing as often as desired. Hands which illustrate a certain point of the game can be stored and dealt quickly to aid in Bridge instruction. In addition, hands from famous tournaments can be dealt and played with the result compared to how the hand was originally bid and played by the experts.